الدوشرمة (نظام التجنيد)

Devshirme is the name European sources give to the selection of children from Christian subjects to be raised in the Janissary corps and in the offices of the Ottoman state. Some books call it "the tax on boys". The matter is disputed among historians. ²

Al-Salabi holds that this system is a fabrication inserted into the history of Orhan and Murad. He says that the Janissaries were formed from new Muslims who entered voluntarily, and from children whom wars had made homeless, whom the state took in and raised in an Islamic upbringing. He notes that the "tax on boys" has no evidence beyond the books of orientalists such as Gibb, Brockelmann, and Sommerville. ²

Al-Salabi attributes to European historians the claim that the state used to take a number of children from the Christian villages and towns as its share of one-fifth of the spoils, raising them in Islam and enrolling them in the Janissaries. He names those who said so: Brockelmann, Gibbons, Gibb, and Sommerville. He concedes that the claim also appears among Muslim historians, including Muhammad Farid Bey and Muhammad Kurd Ali. ²

The museum does not present a ruling between the two accounts. The subject needs a further source from Ottoman studies.